With an explosive growth in network service demand, in both mobile and fixed networks, network providers are being challenged to find solutions that provide high capacity transport and data rates to the end users. Increasing the network capacity by deploying conventional access points does not scale well and can be extremely expensive, with substantially high capital expense (capex) and operating expense (opex) associated with utilizing fiber backhauls.
Further, the rapidly increasing demand for higher throughput and better user experience is driving the need to access more wireless spectrum. The citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) allows shared wireless broadband use of the 3550-3700 MHz band (3.5 GHz Band). Traditionally, this 3.5 GHz band has been used by the department of defense, fixed satellite systems, and some wireless ISPs. However, recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has provided a three-tiered spectrum access framework for sharing the CBRS spectrum. The shared access makes it difficult for a single network provider to acquire more than 80 MHz of spectrum, which poses challenges in providing a pragmatic peak downlink throughput of more than 500 Mbps per user.